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As per the poll.

They are still Traitors but some of the legions falls were more tragic than i had thought.
Though i have always like the Night Lords and the Alpha Legion and the books haven't changed my view of them.
Most of the other traitors are a bit petty IMO but with some good points among them.

Some of the "bad guys" are pretty well-crafted, to be sure. But I don't think any of them--even Lorgar--have espoused convincing reasons for their betrayals. The best case would be reading a book that suspends your knowledge of a well-known character's well-known decisions. Again, BL readers are still waiting for this--or at least this BL reader is still waiting.

In my view, the reasons that the traitors have turned from the Emperor are all very good reasons to be even more loyal.

None of them had good solid reason just a few good points which they felt justified it but ultimately the entire thing is incredibly tragic.
Brother against brother...
BTW about your sig-Are the Ravens the New Orlean Ravens? Or are they someone else?

Manchu wrote:Some of the "bad guys" are pretty well-crafted, to be sure. But I don't think any of them--even Lorgar--have espoused convincing reasons for their betrayals. The best case would be reading a book that suspends your knowledge of a well-known character's well-known decisions. Agains, BL readers are still waiting for this--or at least this BL reader is still waiting.

In my view, the reasons that the traitors have turned from the Emperoro are all very good reasons to be even more loyal.

I'm not so sure. We've gone over this before, but Horus, the big-picture catalyst, turned because he was lied to...about a lot.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

purplefood wrote:None of them had good solid reason just a few good points which they felt justified it but ultimately the entire thing is incredibly tragic.
Brother against brother...
BTW about your sig-Are the Ravens the New Orlean Ravens? Or are they someone else?

Heretic. The Ravens play in Baltimore. The Saints are New Orleans.

purplefood wrote:None of them had good solid reason just a few good points which they felt justified it but ultimately the entire thing is incredibly tragic.

Their own ambitions and arrogance, I think.

BTW about your sig-Are the Ravens the New Orlean Ravens? Or are they someone else?

Baltimore.

Seaward wrote:

purplefood wrote:None of them had good solid reason just a few good points which they felt justified it but ultimately the entire thing is incredibly tragic.
Brother against brother...
BTW about your sig-Are the Ravens the New Orlean Ravens? Or are they someone else?

Heretic. The Ravens play in Baltimore. The Saints are New Orleans.

Be fair we hear next to nothing about American football in Britain.
Though from what i see Rugby is far simpler and way more fun.

Seaward wrote:I'm not so sure. We've gone over this before, but Horus, the big-picture catalyst, turned because he was lied to...about a lot.

As in he was left in the dark, you mean?

I think he just got to big for his britches. Some things are on a "need to know" basis--and sometimes Horus and Magnus did not need to know. What pain and suffering their egos must have undergone! *faints*

In all fairness the reasons for the heresy do reek of teenage rebellion more than existential anguish or corruption.

So what exactly would be a convincing reason to betray humanity? Just, you know, curious.

Nurglitch wrote:So what exactly would be a convincing reason to betray humanity? Just, you know, curious.

Your leader is an idiot. Though i would need him/her to actually make a huge mistake before i would betray humanity.
The people you are fighting are the morrally right side. Though i'm not sure i would betray humanity over that.
To be honest there aren't many reasons for it (Good ones anyway) which is what makes the books about the Horus Heresy hit-and-miss especially when it comes down to the extremly dubious reasons.

I think these novels have really shown how bad guys never think they're the evil ones.

Manchu wrote:

Seaward wrote:I'm not so sure. We've gone over this before, but Horus, the big-picture catalyst, turned because he was lied to...about a lot.

As in he was left in the dark, you mean?

I think he just got to big for his britches. Some things are on a "need to know" basis--and sometimes Horus and Magnus did not need to know. What pain and suffering their egos must have undergone! *faints*

It's never clear just how much the Primarchs really know. It seems that they were aware of the existence of warp entities, but not their true nature. Perhaps they would have fallen to temptations of power, or perhaps they would have realized what they were really in for.

Yet in the cases of Fulgrim and Magnus, it seems that their overweening pride would have led them to their dooms regardless. I can't see Fulgrim not seizing the Daemon weapon as a trophy for his ego; Magnus was sure he knew what he was doing. Horus was already feeling resentment towards the Imperium that reaped the benefits of the battles he fought. Pride led them astray, seemingly inevitably.

The other fallen primarchs are generally easier to understand, I think: Night Haunter was a paranoid nihilist anyway, Perterabo had been deployed too long- beyond even his endurance, and Mortarion was a loyal brother to Horus. That leaves Lorgar...

Lorgar is a zealot. He needs something to worship, something more powerful than him. When the emperor admonished his worship, he turned to something else with power.

And who says Chaos is the evil one?

I'm no longer of the opinion that Chaos is evil. They want only to survive and the Master of Mankind broke his promise to them after making a deal for the gene-forging abilities to create the Primarchs and the Astartes, in return the Emperor was to inform Mankind of the nature of the Warp so that they could join together united, rather than divided by fear and war like all the other races of the galaxy have done.

They were the betrayed ones!

And poor Slaanesh! She was brought into being by the Eldar and, in her first painful moments, abandoned by them! She only tried to live as her creators taught her and yet they left her alone, confused and hungry...

No, my friends, it is not as black and white as the Imperium would have you believe...

Miraclefish wrote:And who says Chaos is the evil one?

I'm no longer of the opinion that Chaos is evil. They want only to survive and the Master of Mankind broke his promise to them after making a deal for the gene-forging abilities to create the Primarchs and the Astartes, in return the Emperor was to inform Mankind of the nature of the Warp so that they could join together united, rather than divided by fear and war like all the other races of the galaxy have done.

They were the betrayed ones!

And poor Slaanesh! She was brought into being by the Eldar and, in her first painful moments, abandoned by them! She only tried to live as her creators taught her and yet they left her alone, confused and hungry...

No, my friends, it is not as black and white as the Imperium would have you believe...

This is a nice thought apart from the fact that the Chaos gods actions really don't support this especially the massacre of countless billions of humans.
Also when Slannesh was born he/she/it ate the souls of most of the Eldar Empire which doesn't really count as 'abandoning'.

I finally got around to reading The First Heretic and Lorgar's problem didn't seem to be so much his fanaticism, but the way the Emperor both delayed and aggravated his censure.

The Alpha Legion made sense as well, pointing out the incoherency of the Imperium's stated goals. Maybe it's just me, but I've never noticed teenage rebellion to be concerned with the consistency of first principles.

Magnus had made his deal with Tzeentch to preserve the Thousand Suns long before the events recounted in A Thousand Sons, and the ensuing events is the electric blue chickens coming home to roost.

In the case of the Thousand Suns I'm reminded of a story that stands as a counter-point to the silly notion that the past is the best indicator of the future: A man falls out of a 200 story buidling. After panicking for the first two hundred floors, he chills out because for the first 199 floors it's so far, so good. A Thousand Sons is pretty much just the legion hitting the tarmack after 200 years of damnation.

@Nurglitch: I agree with you completely about the Thousand Sons. Really, spot-on there.

As to the Alpha Legion, I think teenage rebellion is often about noticing the inconsistencies in your parents' application of authority and trying to claim that being inconsistent is the same as being arbitrary and being arbitrary is the same as being illegitimate.

It's hard to say what a good reason for betraying humanity might be. If I ever decided to write a novel about it, however, I'd probably give it a pretty long think. I may do it just as a hobby, so stay tuned.

In any case, Lorgar seems to have convinced himself that he was the savior of humanity. But it's a tissue thin justification. I haven't finished the book yet but I'm wondering if it this has more to do with denial or subterfuge.

I still hate most of them for being morans. I love the horus hersey. I only feel that Magnus really should of gotten better.

Asherian Command wrote:I still hate most of them for being morans. I love the horus hersey. I only feel that Magnus really should of gotten better.

The biggest irony here is that you spelt morons wrong.

purplefood wrote:

Asherian Command wrote:I still hate most of them for being morans. I love the horus hersey. I only feel that Magnus really should of gotten better.

The biggest irony here is that you spelt morons wrong.

My Language teacher lied to me!

Also i agree with what Nurglitch said about the Thousand Sons.

No, I still think the Traitor Legions are.. uh... traitors. The motivations for the heresy still seem kind of petty.

Miraclefish wrote:And who says Chaos is the evil one?

I'm no longer of the opinion that Chaos is evil. They want only to survive and the Master of Mankind broke his promise to them after making a deal for the gene-forging abilities to create the Primarchs and the Astartes, in return the Emperor was to inform Mankind of the nature of the Warp so that they could join together united, rather than divided by fear and war like all the other races of the galaxy have done.

They were the betrayed ones! ...

I don't know, I have a hard time believing the Horus Heresy visions that the traitors are shown, as its a demon of chaos that is showing it to them and offering the commentary. Everything I've seen in these visions paints the Emperor in a bad light and benefits the Chaos Gods in the end. I'd like to hear an Imperial perspective on these visions.

Manchu:

That's what I mean, teenage logic is a contradiction in terms. They can rationalize, using words they've heard, but uniformly fail to engage in a rational thought process when dealing with their feelings of rebellion.

That's one thing I'll say about The First Heretic, the author never passes up a chance to belabour the resemblance of the Urizen to his father, and goes on to be pretty didactic in relating that Lorgar had dreams of a golden figure he first interpreted as his father, and later as himself.

Given that he'd spent 100 years believing his father to be the savior of Humanity, it seems reasonable that he'd give up on his father before he'd give up on the notion of Humanity's savior. And his father's rebuke for being religious was not only un-necessarily harsh, but poorly timed as well, at least from the standpoint of changing Lorgar's opinion about the necessity of religion.

Horus was driven over the edge at the thought of not being remembered after having been so utterly fantastically spiffy, Magnus had to be hounded off the edge by the Space Wolves, but Lorgar was betrayed by the Emperor.

That's the first heretic.

Note: I personally find the falls of the Primarchs all pretty convincing. It's an interesting psychological facet of people that, if confronted by some fact contrary to their own opinion, such as the Emperor not being God, they will not yank their entire mental structure of beliefs up by the roots and plant a new one. If they are interested in being convinced, and if they accept the fact as their new opinion, then they sometimes change that opinion to reflect the facts. Having performed the cognitive equivalent of a turniquet on the loss of beliefs before any more might need changing, the person will proceed content to labour in the endorphins of being right.

Kind of nice of the author of The First Heretic to riff on that with the Mechanicum Cybernetica attache.

I also enjoyed the bit where I think it's Xephan who's explaining to the Confessor the difference between artificial intelligences and machine-spirits. Of course, the relevant detail to the Chaplain is that artificial intelligence eventually turns on its creator, while to the Tech-Priest the relevant detail is that a machine-spirit is an artificially cultured human mind.

This is kind of funny because in the Philosophy of Mind there's an argument about artificial intelligence, namely that if we make them close enough to us that we can recognize them as having minds, they'll be indistinguishable from us and still leave us with the Zombie Problem. Conversely, if we don't make them close enough to us that we can recognize them as having minds, then we'll never know if they have minds and that leaves us with the Chinese Room Problem. In other words, they have to be the same as us and different at the same time...

This problem seems to turn on how you cash out 'having' and 'minds'. If you approach it ontologically, such that there are things called 'minds' that we 'have', it's reasonable to go looking for stuff. Descartes and Plato say that there are two substances, matter and mind, whereas Berkeley and Aristotle say that there is one substance, which is actuated by the soul.

But the problem actually turns on 'indistinguishable' and 'recognize', since it is actually epistemological. Turing, the mathematicians, goes with indistinguishability as his criterion, which turns out to be a flop as far as a model for empirical research goes, because it turns out that simulating a human mind for the purposes of the unrestricted Turing test has yet to be accomplish. Searle, the idiot, goes with distinguishability, citing instead a biological 'unified field of consciousness' when he misunderstands how computers work.

Searle creates the Chinese Room Problem because he misunderstands how computers (and apparently logic...) work. Searle believes that computer programs are just descriptions of how computer machines might work, and therefore just the way things look rather than the way things are.

So he comes up with the notion that, in principle if not in practicality, he could hop in a box and use a small rulebook to instantiate a computer program that passes the Turing Test in written Chinese. He reasons that if no one could tell the difference between the products of such a computer program the average Chinese writer, then no one could tell the difference between a person and a mindless machine. In logic this is known as "over-generalization", whereby Searle generalizes the presence of an expert system to mean the presence of an entire mind, which are notorious for the number and complexities of the tasks it can accomplish.

Which is the problem with the Turing Test in the first place, that we would predicate knowing if something has a mind on its ability to carry a conversation. [Also the coolest bit of the Doctor Who episode Blink]. Searle, as usual, manages to take the wrong idea and make it worse, suggesting that because we can't predicate knowing if something has a mind on its ability to carry a conversation, then we can't have artificial intelligence at all.

Warhammer 40,000 has a tripartite universe where you get the Cartesian Dualism mixed up with Berkeleyan Idealism, so that an evil d[a]emon could be misleading your mind about the state of the world despite that world being a thought in the mind of God. So it seems that characters often have a brain, a mind, and a soul all at once. Common objects usually have at least one.

The Alpha Legion, on the other hand, don't have believe in whatever abstract nonsense the author is trying to pass off as philosophy about truth, faith, and the nature of the 40k universe, but merely be skeptical of Imperial Truth. Abnett does a good job writing it, although the job is easier from the point of verisimilitude.

I suspect that its harder to write a tragedy when it's hard to relate to the protagonists, but Lorgar strikes me as the most relatable. His response to the destruction of the cities on Khur (cities on the plains, anyone?) was pretty reasonable.

By your reckoning, the loyal primarchs either never confronted the repudiation of any "fact" they had already accepted about the Emperor or the Imperium or even themselves (presumably because they never harbored any such illusion to begin with) or they were able to deal with such a repudiation. Which do you think more likely?

In any case, I don't find that narrative convincing. I mean, that is in fact what happens regarding Lorgar. (I'm not so sure that it applies to Horus or Magnus or any of the others.) I just don't think that it really makes sense for a Primarch (as opposed to a 21st-century teenager) to act this way. Unless, of course, we were to introduce some kind of artifice that forces personalities to work a certain way like



Ah ha! Argel Tal explicitly rejects this explanation, at least regarding himself. We do not know for sure, however, whether or not that, too, is merely another skein of denial. Denial as a basis for rationalization is perhaps the ultimate mode for so much of the treachery that goes on in the HH series.

Manchu:

Then consider that the Primarchs are very much adolescent if that helps. How many of them considered something besides a stunted adolescence of playing soldier? They're never going to go through the usual processes of human development. If they're human they're human after the fashion of children.

Nurglitch wrote:So what exactly would be a convincing reason to betray humanity? Just, you know, curious.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/325391.page#2072991

That is how they've been colloquially referred to among fans for quite a while. I think someone even drew a cartoon-style picture of them as toddlers.

When it comes to CSM, I love the spirit of their current dex:

Svane Vulfbad wrote:I murdered thousands for the Emperor and he gave me nothing except his damning silence. Now his lapdogs yap for every life I take, while the gods promise me the galaxy.

If only Horus had said it!

*EDIT: I realize this is a bit unfair. A marine can get away sounding grandiose when he's just being prosaic. But Primarchs--well, how do you write demigods?

Manchu wrote:

Seaward wrote:I'm not so sure. We've gone over this before, but Horus, the big-picture catalyst, turned because he was lied to...about a lot.

As in he was left in the dark, you mean?

I think he just got to big for his britches. Some things are on a "need to know" basis--and sometimes Horus and Magnus did not need to know. What pain and suffering their egos must have undergone! *faints*

Nah, I mean that he wasn't aware of the existence of Chaos, and Chaos pulled quite a con on him. People say, "Oh, he had a dream in which he saw crazy stuff, big deal." It's more than that. He actually did see reality - he just saw it in fragmented bits, futuristic bits, with absolutely no context. He had no reason to doubt it, basically, any more than you have reason to doubt you're really sitting there reading this post on a forum. Just as you're sure you're sitting there reading, he was sure that he was seeing the aftermath of the Emperor deliberately trying to ascend to godhood and screwing over a lot of the primarchs, in direct violation of what the Emperor said he was all about. He bought into the notion that that's what the Emperor was pursuing, that the Great Crusade was really a lie, just a power grab.

I think that to truly give the primarchs convincing reasons to betray their own kind, you would need much larger book than what have been written. Thousand sons was larger than the rest of the books so far and has done a good job of fleshing out Magnuses' reasoning for betraying mankind.

Plus hindsight is 20/20, what seems like a good reason for lashing out now looks pretty stupid after you've done it.